Frequent Miler on the Air - Rocking Shopping Portals for Huge Rewards | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep291 | 1-24-25

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

In today's episode we'll discuss what's up with Hilton gift cards, we'll intensely debate Virgin Atlantic award charts, cover 2 different points millionaire promos, then finally, we'll tell you how to earns tons of rewards through shopping portals. (01:29) - One reader reports on their success with the Southwest Companion Pass with just one of the Southwest business cards when it had the elevated 120k offer. Read more about the companion pass here. (04:29) - Chase Bonvoy Bold: now features Chase’s Pay Yourself Back benefit. (08:36) - Citi changed transfer rates to Flying Blue to 1.25 (temporarily) (11:38) - Qantas devaluation Aug 5th Check out our Complete List of Transferrable Points Partners here. (18:30) - SAS Eurobonus Millionaire update (22:49) - Chase Travel giving away 1 million Ultimate Rewards points to 10 winners (24:12) - Virgin Atlantic still has award charts (32:43) - Westgate Resorts now bookable w/ Choice Privileges (35:15) - Portal Overview (43:00) - Our favorite shopping portals (starting with Rakuten) (55:54) - Portal Myths Learn more about common shopping portal myths here. (1:12:08) - Stacking Opportunities For more stacking ideas, check out The Art of Extreme Stackery | Ep231 | 12-2-23 here. (1:13:43) - Learn more about card linked offers here. (1:15:26) - Gift Cards (1:16:32) - Learn more about buying gift cards at discount (e.g. Pepper) here: https://frequentmiler.com/instant-gift-card-deals (1:18:05) - Super Stack Example (1:24:26) - What's the deal with Hilton Gift Cards?

On today's show, we'll discuss what's up with Hilton gift cards, we'll intensely debate Virgin Atlantic award charts, we'll cover two different points millionaire promos, and we'll tell you how to earn tons of rewards through shopping portals. Frequent Liler on the Air starts now. Today's main event, rocking shopping portals for huge rewards. There's many ways to earn points and miles and cash back. And we talked about all of them on the show. And one of the major ways is by shopping, like shopping you would do anyway. You can often go through shopping portals and earn big rewards doing so. And you end up paying the same amount you would have paid anyway, but you get extra rewards. Yeah.

We'll talk about that in today's main event. Yeah, we have young kids. And so just yesterday, my wife was looking to buy a bunch of new clothes for the kids. But before she checked out, she said, hey, are there any good shopping portal offers for the store that she was looking at? I was very proud. It was a proud moment. She was thinking about the portal rewards. And so we'll talk more about that today. Don't forget, if you want to jump ahead to a specific segment, or you want to come back to something, just expand the show notes, the timestamps are in

the show notes. So you can look through and find out what interests you. Or if you want links to more information about the things that we're talking about, that's where you'll find those links also in the show notes, the description. So check that out. And don't forget, wherever you're watching or listening, hit the like button, subscribe. We appreciate those things. Thank you for all of that. All right, let's drag out this week's giant mailbag. All right, today's giant mail comes from Tina. Tina says, I've known a little bit about airline miles for the past 25 years, but never gone down in the rabbit hole until approximately one and a half years ago. This is when I found your podcast. Since then, I've been an avid listener. I've listened to almost all the episodes and love the in-depth discussions and knowledge you share. In one of

your episodes, you shared your strategy to earn a Southwest Companion Pass for 2025 with just one Southwest business card when it had an elevated 120,000 point offer. Since earning a companion pass was my goal for 2025 and 26, I decided to follow it almost to a T. I got a bit of discouragement from people warning me that the points will post early, and yes, it was a little nerve-wracking. However, I'm here to report the good news. I got my first tier of points post-pending after January 1st, 2025. And as an aside, that's the key. If you got the card bonus before 2025, then it kind of messes up the whole thing. So anyway, so that's why she's saying it's great that she got it in January. So I am well on my way to getting the Southwest Companion Pass for 2025 and 26. Knock on wood and fingers crossed.

Thank you so much for sharing your strategies. I really love that I could knock this out with just one card. That's awesome. Congratulations, Tina. Well done. And, of course, Tina is talking about a strategy that you can't do right now, but we'll probably see it happen again, because there was a particular offer on one of the cards, where if you waited to meet the spending requirement until after first of the year, then you could do really well. It involved a little bit more complication than that, because in this case, you had to have applied for the card at the

right time and then change your statement cut date, it gets a little complicated, you can go back to the show that we recorded about that. And we'll make sure we have a link in the show notes where we talk about that strategy for the companion pass, because I think we did talk about that pretty extensively. And it's kind of a long conversation. So rather than reiterate all that, check it out in the link in the show notes. But yeah, that's great. That's exciting. I want to tell everyone who's thinking about a companion pass for next year to just be careful, be meticulous. Tina obviously did a great job with this, but every year we hear from someone who accidentally meets the spend a little too early and earns the points a little early. This year was no exception to that, unfortunately. It happens to people almost every year. So you do have to be really meticulous with

it because it's easy, really easy to make a mistake with that. So I'm proud of you, Tina. Well done. Yeah. And this type of play always comes up as you get closer to the end of the calendar year. So wait for us to do, we'll report in, don't worry, in late August, September, October, November, somewhere in that timeframe. We'll let you know when there's an offer like that where you can do the same as Tina did. But congratulations, Tina. Well done. All right, let's talk about card news. So this week's card news, we've got something new and bold on the Chase Marriott Bold card. Yeah, a little strange.

So Bonvoy Bold, that's the fee-free card, right? Yeah. In Marriott's portfolio, they are adding a pay-yourself-back benefit where you can redeem points for statement credit to cover qualifying travel purchases. So the idea is you use your card to pay for certain travel, and after the fact, you basically erase those statement charges with points. Now, in this case, the travel has to be purchases made directly with airlines or at Bonvoy Marriott Hotels, basically. It says hotels participating in Marriott Bonvoy. I don't know why they say it in such a weird way. It's Marriott Hotels, basically. It says, hotels participating in Marriott Bonvoy. I don't know why they say it in such a weird way. It's Marriott Hotels. Anyway, so that's interesting. You can do up to $750 in redemptions per year. The main reason I find this really interesting, it's not like something I'll rush out to get a bold card for, but they pegged the value of points for this at 0.8 cents per point. And that's above what we've

calculated as a reasonable redemption value for Marriott points of 0.7. And our reasonable redemption value is basically the point at which we think is reasonable to redeem your Marriott points for that amount or more. So this, because this exceeds the reasonable redemption value, it would be very reasonable if you have Marriott points to spend to pay yourself back for travel charges charged to this card. Yeah. And before you do that with a Marriott property, you want to check the award rate and see if it makes sense to do it this way versus just booking it as an award stay. Although what's interesting here is that when you're booking an award stay, typically you can only use points at most properties for a standard room. Whereas with this, you'd be able to get eight tenths of a cent per point, theoretically towards any room type you want at a Marriott. So if you want to book a suite,

you could potentially do that and get eight tenths of a cent per point. So, towards any room type you want at a Marriott. So if you want to book a suite, you could potentially do that and get eight tenths of a cent per point. So, I mean, I'm not wildly excited about this. I like to try to get more value out of my Marriott points, but at the same time, it's not a bad deal. And particularly if you've got a lot of Marriott points, you might be happy to get eight tenths of a cent per point towards flights with your Marriott points or towards stays when, again again the award rate doesn't make sense or when you want a room type that's not available as an award or you want to earn a lot of marriott points uh so you know you because you're going to earn on the paid stay uh what are the 10 points per dollar plus plus you'll earn uh if you have elite status you'll earn an elite bonus and you'll earn from the mar have elite status, you'll earn an elite bonus and you'll earn from the Marriott card itself

paying with your bold card. And if you go through a shopping portal, you could also earn shopping portal rewards, huh? That is very true. That's very true. And sometimes Marriott has promos that are only valid on paid stays. And so you might even do even better for all those reasons.

So anyway, it's, again, not huge news in my book, but it's a nice little perk that's strangely limited to that one card. Just the bold card. Yeah, Chase has several Marriott cards, and this is the only one that gets this treatment. And I don't know why the ones that have annual fees do not. Yeah. Pretty odd.

But that's an interesting point that you made there with the whole fact that you'll earn points, you go through a shopping portal. Because that really does kind of enhance it to the point where it's, by some measure, maybe worth more than, or at least if you're comparing to the award rate, it might make this more attractive if the rate is even close to the same as what the award rate would be. So, yeah, interesting. Very good. All right, let's talk about what crazy thing,

and I'm excited because this week it's what crazy thing did Citi do this week? Citi, you're back. You're back. Citi is back. Oh, my gosh. We originally named this segment for Citi. It used to be called What Crazy Thing Did Citi Do?

And so Citi is back with a whopper this past weekend, right? What did they do? Yeah. So Citi updated, changed, adjusted the transfer ratio from Citi Thank You Rewards to Air France KLM Flying Blue. And it's not uncommon to see a transfer bonus of around 25%. And in fact, that's what the ratio was changed to. The ratio was changed to 1,000 Citi points equals 1,250 Air France KLM flying blue miles. And so that would seem reasonable if it were listed as a transfer bonus. It wouldn't

have been a surprise and certainly wouldn't have made the crazy thing segment. But there was no language indicating that this was temporary. There was nothing about it being promotional at all. Normally, when there's a promotional transfer bonus, it says promo and they have the regular rate crossed out and the increased rate in red and some terms and dates as to when that's going to end. But in this case, it just looked like a permanent change. Like they just changed the ratio from 1,000 to 1,000 to 1,000 to 1,250. So we got excited for a hot minute and said, well, it looks like Citi has changed the transfer

ratio to flying blue. And it doesn't say it's a temporary thing. So we thought maybe it was going to hang around. But unfortunately, it didn't hang around. Right, right. I think it lasted through the three-day weekend, you know, until someone came in Tuesday morning and was like, what is happening here? So, I mean, what happened there?

What's the deal here? I mean, because they changed it back. So now it's one-to-one, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know because it's not like someone just changed a number in a computer somewhere because there was also, the actual text on the screen was different.

But then if you go to actually make the transfer it showed the transfer ratio of being you know uh one to 1.25 um so it had to be like i don't know it seemed like someone you know deliberately did something um clearly it was either an error or uh you know could have been a disgruntled employee who's like, I'm going to do something before I leave. It's a holiday weekend. Nobody's in until Tuesday. I don't know what happened there, but something happened.

Yeah. Of course, if you're around disgruntled employee, if you're still around, try 100% bonus next time. And we'll make some transfers before the long weekend ends and then we'll really enjoy that make sure to email us at mailbag at frequent miler.com when you're when you're ready to make that transfer yeah give us a heads up all right well that was fun but uh it was fun while it lasted it didn't last so let's talk about being bonvoid so quantus frequent flyer has bonvoid us. How so, Greg?

Yeah, well, they sent an email to their members saying that basically a devaluation is coming up. They said, well, we haven't changed our award chart in years, and so it's time. And so I actually give them a lot of credit for giving us quite a bit of head start on this. The devaluation is scheduled to happen August 5th. So we have many months to hurry to take advantage of the current prices if we want to. And so that's good. The other thing I guess that's good is that they're saying up to about 20%. The actual amounts will vary, but around 20%, which is not devastating. So that's good.

One thing I didn't like is they claim that they were expanding award seats. And you have to read the text very carefully to understand what they're doing is they're making more award seats available because they're gonna is they're making more award seats available because they're going to give you more ways to use your points to book partner award seats. So it's not like they're increasing the awards on their own flights at all. They're not promising that at all. What they're saying is now on Air France and a number of different airlines, you'll be able to book premium economy with our miles, which you couldn't do before.

And they're also saying, oh, by the way, we're also adding Hawaiian as a partner. So you'll be able to book premium economy with our miles, which you couldn't do before. And they're also saying, oh, by the way, we're also adding Hawaiian as a partner. So you'll be able to book Hawaiian seats. So those are expanded seats. Yes, it's true. There'll be more seats available to book, but it's not the same as more award availability. Yeah, that's kind of that tricky marketing mumbo jumbo that gets thrown around and you always kind of have to look and see, okay, what is it really saying between the lines? But like you, here I have to kind of, I don't want to say give Qantas a pass, but prices rise. And so that's always going to happen. Prices are going to rise eventually. I think they said it had been six years since they last increased award prices. I mean, the price of everything has gone up over the last six years. So I can't be too disgruntled about a program that increases their prices. However, what I do get disgruntled about is when programs do it and don't let you know that it's

coming, you know, because I think that it's just a sign of respect for your members to say, okay, listen, you know, we're going to increase and here's when and you can take advantage of the current award chart until then, because I don't think that that's very expensive for the airline to do to give some advance notice there. And like I said, it just shows a measure of respect for the people who have been loyal to you and collecting your miles or points. You know, they don't know me as much as somebody who's just transferring in points now and then, I guess, but at least they're loyal members who've been flying Qantas a lot and collecting a lot of points. I appreciate the fact that they gave some notice here because we've seen a number of

airlines move toward a model where they don't give any advance notice or even let you know that they increased prices. They just do it. And so I appreciate that from Qantas. Yeah. Yeah. If you're wondering whether you should care much about this, the answer is probably no. Qantas doesn't have the best award prices.

But the one place where they've been useful in the past to a lot of people is those who want to book relatively short distance, one-world flights. For Americans, that tends to be flying American Airlines itself, because they have a distance-based award chart. So their short-distance flights are pretty inexpensive. In recent times, though, Alaska has become a much cheaper way to book those awards. And since Alaska is at least temporarily available to transfer from Amex membership rewards, you transfer to Hawaiian and then to Alaska, it's now a viable way to book those short distance flights, even for people who don't have Alaska miles, but do have membership rewards points. So I think what we're down to is people who care are those who want to book short distance American Airlines flights, don't have membership rewards points or Alaska miles. And so can transfer from other programs to Qantas, I guess. I don't even know who transfers to Qantas off the top of my head.

I don't know if this is like a one and only situation where this makes a difference. It just happens to have been on mine because I was looking at it this morning. I was looking to book a flight from Atlantic City to my home airport of Albany for next week, for travel next week. And of course, American has the bus from Atlantic City to Philadelphia, and then it's a flight from Philadelphia to, in my case, Albany. All right. And you can book that through Qantas. You can't book that combination through Alaska at least next week

on the day that I need. So that that's again, that might just be the bus route and might not be anything else like that. But at least in that case, American wants 9000 miles, Qantas wants 8000 miles. Alaska would sell me Philadelphia to Albany for 4500 miles, but they don't have access, it seems to the the route that includes the bus from Atlantic City, or at least not on the day that I checked. So it could be just a total one-off situation. But at any rate, so maybe there's some usefulness for Qantas in that way between now and August. But yeah, I'm not going to miss this, really. It's probably not that big of a deal.

I want to see what happens if you call Alaska and try to book the bus. I think we should record that live and see what happens. But we're not going to do that right now. I did, while Nick was talking about his bus, I looked up, we have a post called, well, it used to be called Transfer Partner Master List. Right now it's called Complete List of Transferable Points Partners, which is a better name. Complete List of Transferable Point Partners, which is a better name. Complete List of Transferable Point Partners. I don't know.

If we can't say it, is it a better name? I'm not sure. Yeah, right. So I looked up which programs transfer to Qantas. And Amex is one. And I just told you why you usually aren't going to care because you could transfer to Hawaii and then Alaska. But if you want to ride the bus, you got to do it that way to Qantas.

Citi and Capital One also transfer one to one to Qantas. Chase and Built and Wells Fargo do not. There you go. There you have it. Okay. So now we know how you can get those Qantas points. The other thing that's kind of interesting, actually actually in the devaluation is I think now you're going to be able to book Jetstar business class which for most people probably not a big deal but they do fly between Honolulu and Sydney

I think and maybe also Honolulu and Melbourne I can't remember but but anyway if you were looking to book business class on Jetstar that's going to be coming so that's something to keep your eye out on and and whether or not the rate's going to be attractive, I couldn't tell you that. But at least it's going to be a possibility. All right. Speaking of awards like that, let's talk about awards points and more. And first up, we've got an update on the SAS Eurobonus Millionaire Challenge, because we have a millionaire in the house, folks. Well, first, a little background for those who are just tuning in. The end of last year, the end of 2024, SAS joined SkyTeam and did a big promotion where if you flew 15 of their partner airlines, including themselves, before the end of the year, and you credited all those flights to SAS, you would earn a million

SAS miles. We did a challenge based on that that we called Million Mile Madness. And then after we all finished, we sat around waiting for the million points and we waited and waited and waited. I got an email, which we announced earlier in December, I think, saying that I was eligible for the million points, that I had earned it, but I didn't actually get them yet. Well, that changed a couple days ago as you listened to this, that we're suddenly no email, but I got a million points in my account. Nice.

That was very exciting. Nice, nice. Hopefully those million points aren't burning a hole in your pocket just yet. But we look forward to figuring out how to best use a million SAS Euro bonus miles. So that's awesome. That's great. And we also heard from a number of readers who got the million points this week. And then SAS eventually did follow up, I think, with an email saying, congratulations, you

got the million points. Maybe for some people. But at any rate. I haven't gotten. Yeah. So. So anyway, a bunch of people got their million points. However, not everybody has. So others like Stephen and I, who both also flew 15 airlines with Greg, actually have flown 16, I guess.

We got an email saying your Euro bonus millionaire points are being processed, or rather, we're still working on finding your flights, basically. So they're still experiencing technical issues with retroactive flight registration. And so now they're extending the deadline to retroactively submit a claim for missing points to February 28, 2025. So previously, you had to originally you had to submit any retroactive claims by December 20. But they realized pretty quickly that that wasn't going to work. So they extended it to December 31. And then when they realized that they weren't going to get to all the claims by December 31, they extended it to January 31. And now here we are in late January. And they said, you know what, we're going to extend that out to February 28. So I had one claim that I submitted on December 3,

that finally credited on January 11. So I was pretty hopeful that my December 11 claims would be coming in any day now. But those have not updated at all. It's still the same as when I submitted them. So no news on that front, except that now I guess I'm going to be waiting at least another month here, probably. It does say that they're processing these claims bit by bit, and they're not going to, you know, leave any stone unturned in terms of looking for 15 eligible flights. And once they see that you have the 15 eligible flights, they say that they will give you the million points within a few weeks. So, you know, apparently it's going to happen, I hope.

I mean, knock on wood. But, yeah. So we're left to wait. Those of us who flew our 15 flights, but they haven't all credited, are left to wait while SAS goes and looks for our flights. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have this like premonition of us in like late 2029 still talking about this, that they're trying to get it done before the end of the decade. Well, you know, it'll be great if and when it happens, and I'll be thankful for my million

points. But I am a little annoyed because I feel like a lot of the good award availability is likely to be dried up by the time I see my million points because everybody that's gotten their million already is going to be booking up all the good awards now. So, I was hopeful that they would just kind of award it all at once in one big chunk and I'd have a fair shot at booking some awards for travel this year. But, you know, maybe we'll have to just wait for next year to book my awards on SAS. Yeah, maybe you will.

All right. That's not it, though. For awards points and more, we have more. Chase Travels giving away a bunch of points. Yeah. SAS isn't the only one giving away a million points to different people. But Chase is only giving it to 10 people still. 10 people can get a million Chase Ultimate Rewards points,

which I'll take any day over SaaS points. Well, right, right. I mean, and like a million points? Were they watching the SaaS Eurobonus thing? And they were like, oh, I guess a million is the new number. We want in on that. We got to do that in order to get some eyeballs here. So how are they doing this?

Like what do you got to do to get your million points to be one of the 10? It's very simple. You can register. If you have a chase card that earns ultimate rewards points, just register for the promo. I think you can register once per day even.

You can't register multiple cards is my understanding. Anyway, each entry gets you into the pool and gets you a chance to win the million points. So why not give it a try and just put in your name and the last four of your card number in order to register? Yep. Very good. All right. So we'll see. Hopefully somebody listening to this will earn a million points. I'm rooting for me, guys. But if not me, then hopefully it's one of you that'll win a million points there. All right. Virgin Atlantic. We've got some Virgin Atlantic

news. I read your post with great interest this week about how Virgin Atlantic still has award charts. But didn't they go dynamic last Octoberober i don't think i read it well that's why right that's why i wrote this so so i a little background i i was um updating our post on best uses for city points and it had this section in it um about using transferring to virgin atlantic and booking awards that i knew were no longer like bookable at the prices we listed in the post. So I took that out and then I was like, well, what do I say now about the, you know, booking Virgin Atlantic itself? Because that's where Virgin Atlantic has gone dynamic price to dynamic pricing is when using Virgin Atlantic miles to book Virgin Atlantic flights,

they have dynamic pricing. We reported that. We've talked about it a little bit on the show. But I had never looked into that. So I went to look into it to get the full details, and I see on their page what look like award charts. And I'm like, what's going on here uh and what it is is is uh they still do have award charts but the award charts only apply to what they call saver award seats so if a saver award seat is not available then yeah uh the the ticket is priced completely dynamically the the

points are whatever they want to charge for that award flight. That's fair. Some other programs do the same thing with that. But the saver flights, if a saver seat is available, it adheres to the award chart or less. So it's better, it's sort of better than an award chart in that the price you pay may be what it says in the award chart or it might be less than that. And wow, I mean, we kind of gave them a lot of flack for taking away award charts, but they didn't. We just thought they did. Yeah, that's interesting. That's really interesting. You know, I have mixed feelings about this, because on the one hand, you know, that's a great point that they do seemingly have these award charts now. On the other hand, it's kind of like, they do seemingly have these award charts now.

On the other hand, it's kind of like, but what does it mean? I mean, you know, basically an award can still cost anything, right? I mean, they can put some numbers up there on the board, but like if it's going to cost that much or less or more, like what does the award chart mean? No, no, no, no, no. I think it means exactly what a normal award chart means. So except it's better because, all right, look at this.

Like we love that American Airlines still has their partner award charts. So you know if you want to fly to Europe on a – that was a bad example because there aren't a lot of partners good for flying to Europe, but I'll finish this. If you want to fly in business class, I think's what 57 500 miles one way that's what you'd pay if a partner business class award is available to europe um with with um with virgin atlantic for their own flights it's it's similar in that you see what the award price is, but it might be less than that as long as there's a saver award seat available, which is the same rule. So American doesn't have access to partners unless there's a saver award seat available. So it's the same thing. So if you're planning for – we talk about how can you plan for a trip're earning up miles, like to figure out how many miles you want to get.

Well, plan on what the max is. Plan to earn the max. And then you look for saver award availability. So, yes, if there's no saver, it'll cost more. But so before you couldn't book it at all. Yeah. I don't see how that. So if Delta said that a saver award to Europe is now 200,000 miles, and it might be less, but it might be more,

is that meaningful? You could pick a number out of the sky and say, if there's a Saver seat available, it'll be less than this, or maybe this much, but if there's not, then it might be more. I don't understand why this is different from... Suppose they didn't, just like before, suppose they didn't allow you before suppose they didn't allow

you to uh book non-saver seats right so right so right if they if they said you can't book non-saver seats then then the price you get whenever there's an award availability will be the award chart value or less, right? And that's true. Right. Okay. So how is this different? So the only difference here is that if there's not a saver seat, you do see a point cost to it. Right. So what defines a saver seat then?

Well, just like any airline, it's whatever magic they have behind the scenes that decides whether to make seats available at the saver level. And no one knows what that magic is behind the scenes. But it's true with any airline, especially when they offer seats to partners. To partners, yes. And I get that. So what would be different if they didn't have these charts at all?

What would the difference be? If they didn't have these charts at all you couldn't plan on how much you know so right now uh if you're flying from i don't remember the the charts off the top of my head but if you're from most places in the u.s on the east side of the u.s i think business class to europe to london is 47 500 maybe is the award chart. So you could plan and say, all right, let's just say 50,000 to make the math easier. You say, well, I'm going to be flying three people, so I need to have 150,000 Virgin Atlantic points ready to go for when I can find saver award availability. But if they didn't have that chart, I can say, well, I need to plan on having 50,000 a person

and looking for a day when they're 50,000 a person or less. I'm not really sure that if they're going to have, if it's going to vary and they're going to just have tons of seats that are available with no cap, I'm not sure that that really sets an expectation in the same way that a partner award chart does because that's a little bit different since it's partners releasing the availability rather than the airline itself. So I can't think of an example of an airline that has an award

chart now. But it seems to me very similar to if they didn't, like Delta doesn't have a chart at all. Like, I mean, sometimes we see awards, like business class awards to Asia for 80,000 points. So I guess I can plan on maybe it'll cost 80,000. Maybe if I get lucky and it's a flash sale, it'll be less, but maybe it's going to be more. I feel like this is kind of similar with Virgin Atlantic. I think you're giving them too much credit. I don't.

All right, we've got to move on. I don't understand why you think that at all. To me, it's totally the same as if they had an award chart, but you also have the opportunity to purchase seats when they're not available. Well, that's what Delta has, isn't it? To me, it's exactly the same. No.

Deltas are just completely dynamically priced without any award chart at all with occasional sales. That's a very different thing. We occasionally see sales, though. We've seen sales in business class to Europe for $120K. So if they put up a chart and said it's $120K or less,

when they want to put it on sale, they'll put it on sale. I mean, that's kind of what Virgin Atlantic is doing here. When demand is low, then awards are cheap. Well, I guess so. But if you look at their award finder, especially from London to, let let's say new york for example um it shows you uh like on screen like a month at a time with with visual indicators when saver awards are available there's not many business class ones uh going the other way from

new york to london for business class but for premium economy and economy, there's tons of them. And so you can just see at a glance. And going the other way, there were actually, I saw tons of business class ones available. So it's very, I think it's very, very different from an occasional sale where you might find it on one specific route. This is like overall, this is what you can expect to find when save receipts are available, which is the same as old-time award charts. It's exactly the same. So, anyway, but it's

better than old-time award charts because sometimes it's going to be less than award charts. I think you're drinking the Kool-Aid on that one, but if you say so, okay. Readers, let us know. You are so wrong. Let us know. Is Greg right? So, so wrong. Let us know. All right. That's not it for awards points and more. We also have Westgate Resorts are now bookable with Choice Privileges points.

I don't know much about Westgate Resorts. It looks like there's a bunch in Orlando. I saw there's some in Pigeon Forge and Branson, Missouri. I don't really know these resorts, but now they're bookable with Choice Points, and you can book them right on the Choice Privileges website, apparently. Yeah. I did my four minutes and 22 seconds of research on this. Westgate Resorts are timeshare properties, I believe. So basically, the nice thing here is you could use your choice

points to book these and get a place that generally is intended to be family friendly with pools and slides and stuff like that. And you're usually going to have a more condo type of experience instead of like a hotel room. So they have a lot of these in Orlando. And that's where they started out. But they now have them in numbers spread around the country. That's the good news the bad news is like i i looked at their like they have a home page where they list like the starting at cash rates per night for these for these hotels and most of them are really really cheap and i say that's bad news because i the choice points like

at least a couple i looked at where they showed the point prices so far, it was looking at like 30,000 points a night. And so when the cash rate is really low, that's a really bad use of your points. So we'll see. Park City looks like that's an expensive property, gets decent reviews. That could be a great one. When I looked, it looks like the integration is only half-baked. You could buck with cash, but not with points this morning as we're recording this, but hopefully that will change soon.

That might turn out to be a really good use of points, but we'll see. Just a reminder, if you have Citi points and a Strata Premier card, you could transfer one to two to choice. And if you have Wells Fargo, what are are they called autograph cards um then you could also transfer one to two to choice so if uh if you're interested in that combination and if that park city thing pans out that could be a good deal and know that you can transfer one to one from membership rewards or capital one i think but you probably wouldn't want to do that because you can usually buy choice points for a low enough rate that it's not really worth trading your Amex membership rewards points or Capital One miles for.

Totally. All right. That brings us to this week's main event. Main event time. Let's talk about earning huge rewards with shopping portals. What can we do here? Well, I mean, you can save a lot of money or get maybe I say I always hesitate to say save when you're shopping, you can get a lot back when

you're shopping anyway, with shopping portals. So the general overview, the general idea with a shopping portal is it's like a middleman website, where you go to this website, and you click their link to go somewhere else and do your shopping. So let's call it Nick's Portal. So you come to nicksportal.com, not a real site, and you click through my link to go to Macy's, and you buy something at Macy's, and Macy's gives me a commission for sending you to Macy's, and I share some of my commission with you. That's essentially the way a shopping portal works. So there are a number of popular shopping portals. There are quite a lot of these sites out there that exist. And there's an easy way to compare shopping portal rates. And that's using cashbackmonitor.com. Cashbackmonitor.com

lists a whole bunch of shopping portals, ones you've probably heard of, you've probably seen Rakuten on TV, or maybe Top Cashback. Maybe you're familiar with your airline shopping portal, American Airlines has their Advantage eShopping or United Mileage Plus Shopping or all of the various major US airlines have a shopping portal of some sort. So you might be familiar with some of those big ones, but there's lots of other little ones too. And again, the idea is you click through their link, you buy something, they earn something and they pass on some piece of it to you. And I mentioned that chain twice, specifically, because it's important to understand the basic business model of how this works in order to understand some of

the cautions that we'll give you later on in order to make sure that you don't mess that chain up, essentially, and you get what it is you're promised. Yeah, let me, you know, add something there, which is that shopping portals don't have like rates. You can't be like, well, I like to shop at Nick's Fedora's and I know that this particular portal gives me five advantage miles per dollar because that changes over time. They do promos. You have to look at different times. And so whatever the best portal is at a given time for shopping at Nick's Fedoras, which is made up, by the way, will change over time. And that's why we like using a tool like Cashback Monitor

where the idea behind Cashback Monitor is you know where you're going to shop. You know you're going to shop at Nick's Fedoras you know where you're going to shop. You know you're going to shop at Nexford Doors or you know you're going to book a hotel at Marriott or book a car through National. You go there, you put in where you're going to be shopping, National Car Rental, and you look to see who has the best rates for shopping there. They don't cover every single portal in the world, but they cover a lot. Yeah, I mean, they cover enough for my needs. And like Greg said, there are some additional ones every now and then I'll hear about a new one, but they cover plenty for what I need. There's only so many portal accounts I want to have to track. But the nice thing is that you can

see a comparison, a direct comparison. Okay, you can see TopCashBack is offering 8% back. Rakuten is offering 12% back. American Airlines Shopping is offering 7 miles per dollar, etc. And compare those rates and see, okay, who's offering the best deal or the best deal for me? Because one of the nice things, if you actually create an account at CashbackMinder, which you don't have to, it's free. You can just go there. You don't need to create an account or sign up for anything in order to use the comparison tool to see all the various rates. But if you do create an account with cashback monitor, then you can set some preferences,

you can say, okay, I value American Airlines miles at two cents a mile, or, you know, I only value Delta miles at 1.1 cents per point. And it can then help you compare rates, you know, look, you know, with your own valuation. So it can be a really powerful tool if you become more advanced with the whole shopping portal thing, or if you really value one airline mile over another, etc. So we'll talk more about that probably in a little bit. But the nice thing through these portals too, is that there's a bunch of good ones. And there are a few that we're going to talk about that are our favorites. But then actually, I'm going to add one more to the list that we had created at the beginning here. I'll add that at the end. But let's talk about a couple of things

you could do even before you get to the shopping portals. And that's something you can do and that we generally recommend people do is install the Capital One Shopping Browser extension. Now I have this extension installed in one specific instance of Chrome. Chrome allows you to create multiple profiles. So I have a profile just for this where I have the Capital One Shopping extension installed. That's a browser extension for Chrome. And the reason that we tell people about that is because Capital One Shopping often has some crazy targeted rates. And we'll get more into the crazy targeted rates later on. But having the extension installed helps you get some of those crazy targeted rates that we're going to talk about in a bit. Yeah, the way it works is you'll be clicking around browsing a particular store or Marriott properties or national car rental rates and and the because you're doing it within the browser that has that

toolbar extension installed it's watching and it's offering you like cash back offers right there but more importantly it knows where you've you've been shopping and then it emails you sometimes incredible deals for those same places. So I keep it installed on my browser instance where I do the most, I want to say shopping, but it's where I, so I have one browser instance where I do most of my browsing, looking for what I'm going to buy or travel I'm going to purchase. But I usually use a different clean browser instance for the actual purchasing unless it's a Capital One

great offer, Capital One shopping offer, and then I use that same browsing one to make the purchase so that I can get that deal on the one where the extension is installed. The other thing to mention about Capital One, and we've talked about this before, that they have both their Capital One Shopping, which you do not have to have a Capital One card to use Capital One Shopping despite its name. But they also have Capital One Offers, which is another portal, but only available if you have a Capital One card and you log into your account, then you see offers. That one, obviously, you do need a Capital One account to get to that. Both of these, besides having Capital One in the name, have something in common, which is cashback monitor does not show you the rates for these two. So at least as at this time. So unfortunately, you have to go to each of those as well, if you really want to make sure you're getting the best deal.

Yeah, so it does add an extra step over some of the other things that we'll talk about today, but it can very much be worthwhile. Slight variation on what Greg's doing. I have that Capital One browser extension installed in a browser that I don't use often. I only use it when I want to get a good targeted offer. And I'll go to that browser extension and go to whichever site Marriott or Avis or whatever it is that I'm hoping to trigger a targeted offer for. And I'll click around for a little bit and then close it and wait for a day and see if I get a targeted offer in my email. Cause I don't really want them monitoring a lot of my browsing, but I do want them monitoring the things that I really want. So, um, so I, I keep it kind of separate for people that are like, ah, but I don't want everything getting tracked. That's how I

handle it. Anyway. Uh, let's talk about a couple of our favorite shopping portals, the ones that we really like the most. So what's your favorite shopping portal, Greg, in general? Yeah, my favorite one is Rakuten. So first of all, they tend to frequently have great rates. They do these like 10%, or 15%, or 20% deals pretty often. They have a promotion that's available for a few days where there's a whole bunch of stores that are somewhere in that 10X to 20X range, which is great for a lot of different stores.

But even better, in a way, you can choose, instead of getting cash back, to get Amex membership rewards points. So as long as you have one card that earns Amex membership some hotels, you know, it's like getting an extra boost from your portal rewards. It is. And I love Rakuten for that reason. And oftentimes I will value a payout via Rakuten a little bit higher, you know, all things

considered, because I'm also earning Amex membership rewards points through Rakuten. And so when they're offering 15% back, that's really 15 membership rewards points for me. And so I value that more highly than 15% back. So if another portal is offering 15% back, and Rakuten also is I'm going to choose Rakuten 10 times out of 10, because I value the membership rewards points at more than the one cent each, so to speak that that they sort of represent because they show their rates in terms of cashback percentages. So Rakuten is awesome. We both really like it. And if you prefer cashback, also, they very frequently or very often have the best rates or close to them.

They're also, I think, widely loved because they're really good at tracking. Very rarely do we ever run into an issue where an order or purchase through Rakuten doesn't track as expected. And it's very fast, too. They send an email pretty quickly. I say fast. I mean, within a day anyway, usually you'll get an email that a purchase is tracked. Yeah. And you know, one thing we didn't mention about portals, though, is that a lot of them, while they may be fast in telling you you earn points, usually you have to wait quite a while before you get those rewards. And so just be prepared for that. It could take months to get your behind the scenes is the portal, whoever, you know, the company that runs the portal is waiting to get the cash back that they're owed by the merchant, by the store that you shopped at. And until they get that money, they won't pay you. There are exceptions to that. Like most airline portals will

pay you the miles up front and then take them back if they don't get paid. Yeah, that's a really good point. And it's an important one to mention because different retailers probably handle that differently. You have to really be conscious of how the process works. Because, you know, like if you clicked through Rakuten, you went to Saks Fifth Ave and you made a purchase at Saks Fifth Ave, you have to keep in mind that Saks has to let Rakuten know that you made a purchase. Rakuten only knows if Saks communicates that with them, right? So first, it has to get communicated to Rakuten that you even made a purchase for Rakuten to let you know that the order is tracked. And then Saks has to at some point pay Rakuten before Rakuten is going to pay you.

And not all merchants do that in the same way. I'm sure that some merchants probably send over order reports instantly, others probably daily, some probably process that stuff as a weekly thing. And, and so it probably takes different amounts of time for different things to track. In fact, I just had one today that came through a tracking email from Rakuten from a purchase I made two months ago. Most things through Rakuten are like a day, this one was like two months. And that's just because the retailer obviously took forever to let them know that I made a purchase. And that's not on Rakuten, that's on the retailer and the way that they handle the

reporting of these things. And then of course, there's a long lag period because if I bought something from Saks, Saks knows that I might return it. And if I return it, they want to get their money, they don't want to pay Rakuten for a purchase until they know I'm not going to return the purchase. So probably they're not paying Rakuten until the return window has closed. So Rakuten is not going to pay me until that happens. And so that's why it takes a long time in most cases. Yeah. And there's also middlemen affiliate networks in between the portal and the merchant. So they could have their own policies that cause things to be delayed as well. And then there's what you buy.

So if you're buying travel, you generally won example, or you're booking a rental car where you pay at the counter, those things, you don't get paid till afterwards, but it might track right away. Yep, absolutely. So you got to have some grace in terms of handling how patient you're going to be in terms of finding out that something has tracked and then getting the rewards. It does take a while. That said, this stuff adds up. I mean, I earn a bunch through portals every year and it really does add up. So it's worth doing. It's just also worth knowing that in most cases, this stuff is not like instantaneous in the way that we

expect most things in 2025 to be instantaneous. There is a little bit of lag because there's a lot of moving parts to getting paid. So yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So that was a massive aside. Let's get back to what our favorite portals were. We both agreed Rakuten is our first favorite. What's your second? Capital One Shopping. Capital One Shopping, which again, as Greg mentioned, has really nothing to do with Capital One apart from the name. You don't need a Capital One card. You can just create an account at Capital One Shopping with an email address. And I love this portal because of the incredible targeted rates. If you just go to CapitalOneShopping.com and you search in the search box, you're going to find lots of regular run-of-the-mill ho-hum rates. But their targeted rates are where it's at.

So once you sign up for an account, install the extension, get to clicking around a little bit, there are two different ways to get targeted rates with Capital One Shopping via email. They'll send offers very frequently. I get them almost every day. And also just going to the website, you will find targeted offers on the homepage. If you start scrolling down on the homepage of the website, there will be offers targeted to you that are often far better than the rates. If you try and search in the search box at the top, you'll see a much lower rate. But if you scroll on the homepage, you'll find lots of much better targeted offers for you. And these targeted offers are bananas. They're often way higher than what any other portal is offering. Like for

instance, today in my email, I got 40.5% back on activities booked through Expedia, 35% back on Best Western, 30% back on Avis, up to 70% back somewhere I can't even remember. So we've seen crazy offers like that, up to 30% and sometimes even more. The catch, though, is that this is not cash back, but rather rewards that, up to 30% and sometimes even more. The catch, though, is that this is not cashback, but rather rewards that you have to redeem for gift cards. And so there's only a limited number of different merchant gift cards that you can redeem these rewards for. That said, they have Kroger and Safeway. So those are two brands that are probably useful for a lot of people listening to the show anyway. They don't do me any good because I don't live in the footprint of those grocery chains, but I bet a lot of listeners

do. And so those are two good options for redeeming your rewards for gift cards. But they have lots of other stuff hotels.com and gift cards, rather hotels.com hotels.com gift cards, Uber eats, I think is in there and DoorDash and a bunch of stuff that you may be likely to use often enough to get okay value anyway out of those Capital One Shopping Rewards, certainly considering the huge payouts. Yep. Yep. Absolutely true. What's up next? All right. Our third favorite. And I'm saying our because we discussed this before the show

about the... I listed my top favorite ones and Nick agreed that that's the right order for him too. Third is Top Cash Back. It's just a cash back portal. You can't get membership rewards points from this one, but it's just a solid, reliable portal that offers usually very good rates, not bonkers high rates like those targeted Capital One shopping ones. But often when Rakuten isn't having a special promotion, usually you'll see top cash back rates higher than whatever Rakuten is offering. So they're a good one for that.

Yeah, and I've had great success there too. Now I should mention a blanket thing about all of these portals is that we've gotten an email or two on just about every single portal I've ever heard of from people who've said that they've sworn it off forever because something didn't track properly. And as I just explained, the process gets complicated. And so sometimes things don't track the way you expect them to. It's pretty rare in our experience with the ones we're talking about here. I have not had big issues. In fact, I've shopped a lot through all the portals that we're talking about here. And when I say a lot, I mean, probably a lot more than most people that are listening to this are ever going to use these portals. And by and large, everything has gone really smoothly

with them. So especially considering the amount of volume over the years that I've done with these, I feel pretty good about recommending them because I've had really good success. So if you're listening to this and you're like, oh yeah, but I had something through TopCash back or I had something in Rakuten or Capital One Shopping that didn't work out. Yeah. Unfortunately, sometimes things don't work out right, but it's pretty rare overall with these based on our experience, at least. Now you had one more that I didn't have on my list. I did actually have two more that you didn't have on your list. And one of them you're going to say, Oh, I'm really sure,

but not my list probably. But the first one is Swagbucks. Swagbucks is another one, a shopping portal. It's kind of similar. They award Swagbucks and then you can redeem the Swagbucks for either gift cards or including Visa and MasterCard gift cards, or you can redeem the swag bucks for either gift cards or including visa and mastercard gift cards, or you can redeem for a PayPal deposit. They just send a PayPal payment to your PayPal account. So essentially it's like cash back. And so swag bucks can be useful because sometimes there are offers available through swag bucks that aren't available through other things. Swag bucks tends to have a lot of checking account bonuses. Sometimes they'll have bonuses for things like signing up to be an Uber driver or deliver door dash. And while you may not want to be an Uber driver or deliver door dash,

every now and then we see something ridiculous, like get $300 worth of swag bucks for signing up and doing at least one ride. And I've done those types of things through this. And again, swag bucks has generally posted reliably for me. So that's another one that I think is worth a mention. And then I'm going to add one more to the list that we probably should have had on here. And that's the American Airlines Advantage Shopping Portal. And the reason that I'm going to add that to the list is because when you're shopping through the American Airlines Advantage Portal, you're earning both airline miles and loyalty points. So if you're chasing American Airlines elite status, the advantage and we both have chased advantage

elite status, primarily through offers from the shopping portal in the past. So when you're clicking through the shopping portal, and then buying something, then you're earning American Airlines miles and loyalty points. So you're making progress towards elite status. That's true for the most part, if they're running a temporary promotion, like spend 500 across all stores and earn an extra thousand points, those aren't loyalty points. But if you see an offer like, hey, sign up for Blue Apron and get 5,000 American Airlines miles, well, those are also 5,000 loyalty points. And so I have used that to bridge the gap to reach elite status. And I probably will again this year because I'm going to end up close enough

to earning some status with American. Then I'll probably do a couple of shopping portal offers in order to bridge the gap. Yeah, well, and if you're going to add that, don't forget Alaska's shopping portal now is also offering a way to earn elite status through shopping rewards. So that is a little bit more complicated how that works.

But so I won't go into that right now. But that's worth looking into if you're more interested in Alaska Airlines, elite status than Yeah, the only reason I didn't put that one in my list of favorites is because it is a little bit more complicated and difficult to understand the American one is relatively easy. So but that's a good point that they're both now giving you opportunities there. Okay, so we talked about some of our favorite portals, we talked about the basic like model as to how portals work and some information about why it takes forever for some things to track, etc. Let's talk about some popular myths, because I think that there are some

things that people are very frequently confused about. And we hear the same things again and again from people, the same areas of confusion, where people either are confused or make an assumption or misunderstand something that is really important to know about shopping portals. So what do we have for these myths? Yeah. And we have a blog post, by the way, that's the top shopping portal myth. So if you want more detail about any of the things we're about to mention, go check that out. And we'll have a link to it in the show notes. All right. The first myth we list is, and this is the myth, that bank portals require

payment with the bank's credit card. So for example, I mentioned the Capital One offers portal where you have to log into your Capital One account and then you get these offers and you click through from there and you can buy stuff and get rewards. Do you have to pay with a Capital One card, with the Capital One card that you logged into to get those rewards? What's the, is the myth true or false? It's false.

We've had plenty of reader reports who've used other cards and still earned those rewards through specifically Capital One offers. But also the same thing is true with other bank shopping portals. I mean, Chase Ultimate Rewards has shopping portal offers earned those rewards through specifically Capital One offers. But also the same thing is true with other bank shopping portals. I mean, Chase Ultimate Rewards has shopping portal offers. And same thing, you click through, you can use whatever credit card you want.

It doesn't make a difference. So if you're using the bank portal, again, use whatever card is the best for that purchase. As long as you click through the link, that's what creates like the tracking cookie that is going to make sure that they are made aware that you've made a purchase. So as long as you're clicking through, you're going to be fine with whichever payment method you choose. With one big caveat, big caveat. If something goes wrong and you have to contact the portal for help and you didn't use the

bank's credit card, they might not help you at all. That's a good point. So that to me is a major caution to be aware of that if you're going to use a different credit card, hopefully it's for a good reason. Like you're going to earn a lot more points, you need to finish spend, you know, minimum spend to earn a welcome bonus, whatever it is, you better have a good reason because if you're really counting on those rewards, if anything goes wrong with the tracking uh you're probably on and you know that's actually that's another decent caveat in there in general like i earn a lot through shopping portals and and i do that like that makes a difference in terms of how i might book or buy something

but i always i never count on that to the point where like, I wouldn't have made the purchase if not for the rewards in general. And generally speaking, I'm not going to buy something that I wouldn't have bought anyway, just because of the rewards, because things do go wrong sometimes. And so maybe, you know, if something just breaks, maybe I won't get it. And so this is a good instance where you're like, I mean, if it's really important to you that you get those rewards, do everything you can to try to make sure that it's going to be easy to follow up later and go ahead and use the bank's credit card. But, you know, if you're like me, then you might say, well, but I could earn a few more points per dollar with this other card and I don't

need the portal rewards. So, I will intend for that to work. But if not, I know I might not have a like to stand on when I follow up for support. Right, right. All right, myth two. This is very similar. The myth is that airline portals require payment with an airline-branded credit card. So, like, you're going through Advantage Shopping. You click through to Macy's. Do you have to pay with your American Airlines card? Absolutely not.

And this is one that, unlike the previous one, you're not going to have any trouble following up on a missed thing if you didn't use it. You don't need to even have the airline credit card, no less use the airline credit card for the portal. So some people get this impression, but it's just totally wrong. It doesn't matter what you use after you've clicked through from an airline portal. 100% agree. All right. Myth number three, the portal determines which purchases qualify for points or cash back. Yeah, and this is totally not true. And this goes back to the model that we talked about before in terms of how the whole thing works. It's the merchant that's deciding whether or not your purchase is eligible for rewards. And if the portal gets paid, you're going to get paid. And if the portal doesn't get paid, you're not going to get paid. And so that's basically the way it works. So when these

things go wrong, I would bet that 90% of the time it's something going wrong on the retailer end, the merchant end, rather than on the portal end. Because I mean, the portal is in business to give you rewards because that means they're getting paid. So they certainly are not in the business of trying to not pay you. They want to pay you because they want you to come back and keep using their portal instead of another portal over and over again. And if you think that your one purchase of $400, they're just trying to steal the five bucks from you, that's just not going to be a significant amount of money for them. So again, this is mostly a merchant issue when it doesn't,

when it doesn't track. It's whatever the, you know, merchant policies are come to play, right? So myth number four, the portal says rewards, the rewards rate is not eligible on gift cards. So I won't get points for buying gift cards. Is that true? It is sometimes true. And it's most often true when you're looking at a retail merchant, you know, a Macy's, whatever, that they sell their own gift cards. Often you won't get rewards if you click through, buy that Macy's or Saks or whatever it is gift card from the store itself. But there are sites like giftcards.com that are specifically about buying gift cards. That's all you could buy on those sites. And they're available through portals.

And the portal still says not available on gift cards because that's just standard terms that they put everywhere. Right, right. And so you will get rewards right and it's worth mentioning there are some other sites sometimes where you do earn points buying gift cards so you know if i'm buying a gift card i'll click through a portal even if it says i'm not going to earn rewards because what's the worst case scenario i'm not going to earn rewards same as if i don't click so i might as well click and see if i'm going to earn the rewards so uh so it's

always worth going through even if it says you won't get the rewards, but don't expect it on. Oh yeah. Absolutely. Like Macy's or whatever. Do expect it from gift cards.com. Right. Although,

but sometimes it does work on, you know, stores like Macy's, like department stores or, you know, specialty stores. Sometimes it does work. So you just,

it's worth, worth the try. And if it does work, you know, then what might work is the old double, double dip here where you go through and you buy a gift card and then you go through the portal again and use the gift card and earn rewards twice. I don't, I'm not aware of many places where the double dip still works, but you know, it can work and it does at some places. So

worth trying that when you get a chance. All right. Myth number five, the portal says not eligible on gift cards, so I won't get points for using gift cards. But just a second ago, we were talking about buying gift cards and whether or not you'll get rewards. What about if I click through a portal and then I use, like Saks, it's a great example. Let's say I have a Saks gift card and I click through a portal and I make a purchase using my Saks gift card. does this language mean I'm not going to get rewards? Not at all. Usually, I'd say 99% of the time, if you're using a gift card, you're still going to get rewards. Unfortunately, there are places. I remember 1-800-Flowers, I think was one of them, where you don't get rewards if you use a gift card. And I don't know any easy way to know ahead of time,

but most of the time I feel 100% safe at most normal retailers. And what I mean by that is there are certain sites like 1-800-Flowers that have their own kind of special deals with portals, and it's kind of obvious because when you click through, you see like a banner that says something about where you came from, you know, thank you, advantage, shopping, shopper or something. And so because it's kind of integrated in their site that you came from somewhere like a portal thing,

they're more, you know more on task about what things they're going to reward you for and whatnot. But the vast majority of merchants treat like paying with a gift card the same as paying with a credit card and you're just going to get whatever reward you get. Yeah, yeah. And I don't know how to tell someone

the difference between normal merchant and not normal. Because like things come to mind, like 1-800-Flowers, Omaha Steaks, stuff like that. I that i would be like oh if i use a gift card it may not work because i probably have some special deal for when you use a gift card to only get this or that or or i'm typing in the gift card in a box that's kind of like a promo code box and so you know then it's it's not likely to work whereas if i'm typing it into a box, it looks more like a payment method box. Yeah. I don't know how to tell somebody who doesn't know the difference what the difference is

there, except to say that, like Greg said, like 99% of the time, you're going to be fine using a gift card. After you've clicked through a portal, you're going to earn your rewards. All right. Myth number six. When things go wrong, it's the portal's fault. The portal did something wrong. The portal messed up the tracking. The portal wanted to steal my money. It's probably the portal's fault. Yeah, it's probably not. It's probably your fault, unfortunately. So yeah, Nick mentioned sometime in the show that we get reports from listeners, readers all the time about how awful portal A, B, C, or D is because, you know, there's a whole long thing. But, yes, sometimes someone believes they properly clicked through a portal and bought their portal says, we don't have any tracking information that you bought this thing or maybe even that you visited the store at all.

There's all kinds of things that can happen here. One is there are some, like, plug-ins that prevent – that deliberately, like, prevent tracking from one site to another. Like, those ad blocker things might do that. That might mess up the tracking when you click through. So if you have something like that installed, you might want to use a different browser or a different browser instance to do your shopping. If you have a toolbar,

like we were talking about Capital One Shopping Toolbar, if you have a toolbar like that, but you're clicking through from a different portal, you have to be really careful because the shopping portal toolbar thing, the browser extension might pop up a little thing saying something about check these codes for a special deal at the store. And if you click that, if you do anything, if you interact with that toolbar at all, it's going to take over the tracking of that shopping instance. So you got to be really careful.

I would not recommend using the same browser for shopping through like a website like Rakuten where you have a toolbar, a browser extension installed. Yeah, that's a good point even like little things like it pops the capital one shopping one is an example where it'll pop up and i think probably honey and other things like that do the same thing we'll pop up and say hey you want to try these five codes and i think i would guess that even clicking the no thanks button probably is enough to potentially mess up the tracking that you've already clicked through.

It's possible. And maybe not with Capital One Shopping in particular. I don't know that to be the case, but I haven't tested it. But I'm sure there are probably other third-party extensions out there that are just designed to try to get you to click somewhere so that they can take over the tracking cookie on the purchase. So be careful. Yeah. Another thing that might be your fault is where a lot of stores say not eligible

on using coupon codes that are not on this listed here in this portal. Now, it's kind of like gift cards. Usually you can use coupon codes, even the ones that aren't listed on the portal, but not always. Sometimes they actually do enforce that rule. So if you used a coupon that wasn't listed in your portal, you know, it's kind of on you

if that doesn't get reported. And the reason for that is, so like you gotta remember, the portal is essentially like a salesperson. They're earning an affiliate commission for sending you to the retailer. If the retailer thinks that they could have gotten you with an email coupon code without the middleman, they've got no reason to pay the middleman. So often we find when this doesn't work is when you're using a unique coupon code.

Like if you go to a retailer website and it pops up with a sign up for a shopping list and get 10% off or sign up for an email list and get 10% off, they'll often send a unique code. And that unique code might invalidate your portal rewards because like I said, as far as the store is concerned, it was their 10% code that drove the purchase and not the shopping portal at that point.

And so they're gonna say, oh, it wasn't you, it was our code that made the person make the purchase. And so they probably aren't going to pay the portal and portal probably isn't going to pay you. But store wide promo codes frequently do still work for tracking portal rewards. Again, not necessarily always, but I do oftentimes stack the two, I will evaluate though, like what is more important here on this purchase? You know, if I'm clicking through to make a purchase where for instance, from Capital One Shopping, I bought some things at Christmas time that were like 60% back

through the Capital One Shopping portal. When I got to the website, it offered me the pop-up and said, hey, join our email list for 10% off. And I was like, no way, I don't care about that 10% off. I care about the 60%. I don't want to do anything that might mess up my 60%. So I didn't sign up. Maybe I could have used that. Maybe it still would have tracked, but I don't want to work in maybes there. I knew it

would work if I didn't input a coupon code. So in that case, I didn't. But in another case where the coupon code is taking 60% off, well, then I probably would enter the coupon code and maybe the purchase tracks, maybe it doesn't. And if it does, great. So that's how I approach it. Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. And so we talked about a number of ways that it could be your fault that a portal didn't work.

Also, it could be the merchant's fault that they didn't report the sale correctly, that something about the tracking codes like didn't sync up. so even though they know you made the purchase they might not know it got sent by the particular portal um it could be the affiliate network that messed up and didn't didn't send the right information to or payment to the portal of course there there are probably times where portals themselves mess up but i think that's such a minority of the times

when things go wrong, when shopping through portals. It's so rarely the portal's fault. So that's why that's- There's so many complexities there. I had one a couple of years ago that I probably talked about where I placed an order through Lenovo for a laptop and then also like a little external number pad

so I could type numbers like a calculator. And the laptop took like a month to ship, but the little like number pad. So I could type numbers like a calculator. And the laptop took like a month to ship, but the little like number pad shipped right away. And so the cash back ended up tracking on just the little number pad because they shipped them separately. So they probably charged my card two separate times. That's often what happens when a retailer ships out in multiple shipments. And so the original order just got reported as the little keyboard thingy. And so the portal only gave me rewards on the little keyboard thingy, which was only a couple of dollars and not the laptop that was the majority of the purchase. In that case, I followed up with customer service and I did get it worked out through the portal. But there's a

lot of stuff like that, that you might not even see that happens behind the scenes, that maybe things get split up and messed up. So like Greg said, frequently not the portal's fault. All right. So let the record show for listeners to the podcast that Nick cannot say number pad without raising his paw and wiggling his fingers. It's pretty cute. Lady Gaga was doing an interview one time. She was talking about being on Wikipedia

and changing things. And I don't know, that emotion was very, yes, very distinct. So I didn't mean to do that. But I guess I just did. All right, stacking opportunities. Let's talk about stacking opportunities. Because one of the nice things about shopping portals is a lot of ways to stack turn a whole bunch of rewards, right? Absolutely. There are tons of ways to stack things and get more rewards than just what the shopping portal offers. We did a whole show on that in 2023. It's called, that show is called The Art of Extreme Stackery, episode 231. So check that out if you want a lot more details

than we're gonna get into now. But let's just list out some ways that you can stack rewards, get more than what the shopping portal offers. Well, I mean, first of all, sometimes portals will offer portal-wide spend bonuses. I mentioned before, sometimes you'll see an airline portal

run something like spend $500 across whatever retailers this week and you'll earn an extra thousand miles or something of that sort. So that's often something you have to consider along with the payout because maybe you're going to spend $500 and earn five miles per dollar at Saks, but also you're going to spend $500 and earn five miles per dollar at

Saks, but also you're going to trigger this offer for an additional thousand miles. And so you have to kind of consider that because that's a potential stack, but it gets a little better because sometimes you've got credit card bonus categories. So for instance, if you're buying something from an office supply store, you might be able to click through a portal and earn the portal rewards, maybe that special portal bonus I just mentioned, and then also use a credit card that earns, let's say, five points per dollar at office supply stores. There's a few of those out there.

And so you could be stacking and earning increased rewards on your card. Yeah, the Chase Inc. business cash card is one that comes to mind, of course, for 5X at office supply stores. Another category of things that you can do to bump up, to stack extra rewards, is what we call card-linked offers. This is where you can get a reward for shopping at a certain merchant, not by clicking through something, but by adding that offer to your credit card and then making sure you pay with that same credit card. So there are things like Amex offers, Chase offers, Citibank offers, Bank of America offers, where it's all like that. You log into your bank account and you load the offers that are available. There's also third-party sites that do a similar thing.

And one that comes to mind is Simply Miles, where this is for, it's limited to MasterCard. So you have to have a MasterCard to do this, but it gives you American Airlines miles and loyalty points for these things. And so often you'll find the same merchants are available both, you know, have an offer like 10% back at, you know, Marriott, like Fairmont Hotels or something like that through a Chase offer, let's say. And you'll find them, you know, Marriott on a shopping portal. So you can click through your shopping portal, pay with your Marriott card. I mean pay with your Chase card that has that Marriott offer linked to it. It's not necessarily a Marriott card. And so those things can stack.

One thing I want to point out, Stephen wrote a great post about his favorite card link programs. So we'll have a link to that in the show notes. Yeah, there's a number of interesting card link to offer programs out there. gift cards, you might be able to buy a gift card at a discount and stack that in with some of the other things that we're talking about here. So you might be able to buy a gift card from something like the pepper app. And so the pepper app is an app where you can buy gift cards and earn rewards back. And sometimes they run some pretty good deals. And in terms of the amount you can get back. So let's say you're able to buy I'm going to make this one up. It's probably not realistic. But let's say you're gonna buy something at Walmart. And you

can get 10% back when you're buying the gift card at pepper. So you buy $100 gift card Walmart gift card from pepper, and you get $10 back and rewards from them. And then you click through a shopping portal and get 10% back at Walmart and you use your $100 gift card to pay. And so in the end, you end up getting your 10% from the portal. So $10 there and the 10% back from Pepper, $10 there. And so now all of a sudden you've gotten essentially 20% back. So you could get a pretty good deal. There are other things I mentioned, Pepper. Pepper is one that I'm lukewarm on, actually, because they've run some just unsustainably wild deals lately. But there are other ones out there too. So you can go to frequentmiler.com slash instant gift card deals. And we'll have a link to that in the show notes. So you can take a look at all the various programs

where you could buy a gift card instantly. All right. So I have to stop for a second here. So you're lukewarm on Pepper because they have these great deals, but you love Capital One Shopping because they have these great deals. That's a great point. What's the difference? Pepper seems suspect to me. I mean, we'll see. We'll see what happens.

But I imagine the merry-go-round's got to stop at some point. So I have been... So you're worried that the rewards you earn, it'll evaporate because they'll suddenly go out of business. Yeah. And Capital One's not going out of business anytime soon. And they're not going to let the Capital One shopping portal fold and not pay out the rewards. Even if they decided to close up shop, they'd pay out the rewards. I have no idea about that. I don't know. I just know that they can't continue. Like some people have been getting targeted offers for like 20% back at retailers where you can't get 20% back anyway. That's reasonable. So I don't know how long they can do that for, but for a while anyway, it's going well. And I should say like I bought, I bought a gift card

from pepper yesterday. So it's not that I'm not using it at all. Uh, I'm just not going wild and crazy on it, but if I'm going to use one right away, I mean, I bought one for Walmart yesterday, I bought something on walmart.com. And I said, Oh, I might as well redeem some pepper rewards, because I had some rewards points in there to use anyway. And there's a new Amex offer out for pepper. And so I didn't have that on my accounts. But if I did, I certainly would have bought that gift card through pepper to use the Amex offer and then use the gift card right away. So can you give us an example? If you're going to do like a super stack like that, like I just kind of talked about, how

would you do it? Yeah, yeah. So I'm going to use an example where I had, I kept getting offers from Capital One Shopping for Columbia Sportswear. And I think I got something like a 60% offer before the holidays and use it to buy a bunch of gifts. But let's just say, let's just say you're interested in buying something and you get a 30% back offer from Capital One Shopping. How could

you super stack that? And so here's a theoretical example. I mean, a lot of things have to work right for it all to work. But let's say you're hoping to buy a $100 item from Columbia. Maybe you're lucky enough to have an Amex offer for the Pepper app that's buy a $75 gift card and get $30 back. Well, a $100 gift card would certainly qualify you for that $30 back. So that's an easy one. If you pay, if you happen to have that offer on an Amex business gold card, we've been finding that that earns four points per dollar. I think it goes as like computer supplies or something like that, buying gift cards from Pepper. So four points per dollar by doing that. But by buying the Columbia gift card through the Pepper app, you're also getting Pepper rewards.

So that's going to vary what the exact reward amount is. And then ultimately, so you buy the gift card and then you shop through the portal at Columbia is how it all goes. So here's an example of what the rewards might actually look like. Let's assume the portal is 30% back. We want to buy a $100 item. So we buy the $100 gift card through Pepper. We get $25 back from Amex for that Amex offer for the Pepper app.

The business gold card, we earn 400 points. Let's just call that $4 for simplicity. Pepper rewards, let's say it's 6% back in rewards. And again, let's just call that $4 for simplicity. Pepper Rewards, let's say it's 6% back in rewards. And again, let's just call that $6 for simplicity. The Portal, 30% back. Let's call that $30. Total rebate, $65 on $100. And that's phenomenal.

That's phenomenal. That's a great deal. I mean, at that point, whatever you're buying is probably a good deal. If you're getting that much back, it probably doesn't matter what you're buying. You're getting a good deal. I mean, at that point, whatever you're buying is probably a good deal. If you're getting that much back, it doesn't matter what you're buying, you're getting a good deal on it. So if it's something that you could remotely use, it's you're probably getting a good enough deal to buy. I mean, I bought some things at the holiday time because of stacks like this, where I was like, I this actually kind of goes against what I said before, this is something I probably wouldn't have bought if not for all these rewards. But wow, sometimes the rewards can add up to be so much that I'm like, well, maybe I do need that thing because I'm not going to, you know.

Right, right. Well, you know, especially when we're seeing sometimes 60%, 70% from Capital One Shopping, which is absurd. But I saw that mostly before the holidays. I've seen less of that. But still, I mean, great. 30%, 40% is still coming to me. Again, check out our show, The Art of Extreme Stackery, episode 231 for a lot more

if you like that kind of magic of super stackery. Yeah, you know, and the Capital One Shopping front, something that I figured we'd talk about at some point, I realized I should have talked about it earlier, is that we mentioned using the browser extension and clicking around. And so I have the browser extension installed in a window. And if I want to buy something like yesterday, my wife was looking to buy clothes for our kids at the children's place. And so she asked for any good offers. I looked through and portal rates for

the children's place weren't great. And I said, give me a day, hang on. And I went and I browsed around the children's place for a while on in the browser where I have the Capital One Shopping extension installed. And now I'm waiting. I mean, like I'm in the first 24 hours here and I would bet you that within the next 24 hours, I will probably get a good increased rate for the children's place. It just, it frequently happens that way. Not a hundred percent, not going to happen every single time, but it happens a lot. I had the same thing happen with Avis recently where I just went and I clicked around a little bit because they had the best rate on a rental car that I was probably going to book. And literally the next day, I got 30% back. I got an email offer for 30% back at Avis. Something to know about Capital One Shopping,

we mentioned that they send email offers and the email offers are usually limited to up to $250 in rewards on a single purchase. I have not had that restriction replied when clicking through buttons from the website. So on the Capital One Shopping website, I've earned more than $250 on a single purchase plenty of times. The email I ran into that cap once where they said, Nope, you can't get more than 250 on a single purchase. I haven't seen that listed anywhere in the terms on the website. It's just in the terms of the email offers. So know that there is a slight difference between their email offers and their website offers. But it's worth clicking around when you're going to buy something like those things because you can often influence some

targeted email offers. Yeah. Yeah. You could totally do it deliberately. But the reason I keep it on my main browsing instance is because I often get deals accidentally that I wouldn't have even thought to look for. So, you know, for example, we talked about how Choice Privileges has this new, you know, partner, what is called Westgate Resorts. And so I, you know, I click through to check them out. And now I'll probably get a, you know, book through Choice and get 35% back through Capital One Shopping, something like that. Now, that's not a great example because I'm not actually right now interested in that. But sometimes just randomly, things I wouldn't have thought to click around for the purpose of getting a deal, I just randomly get. I'm like, whoa, I wouldn't have thought to do that. That's a good

deal. So, yeah, different approaches there for different folks. Okay. I think that's all. And it kind of wraps us up on shopping portals. I love to use Shopify. I use them all the time. This is something I very frequently use. I earn a ton of rewards every year.

So I recommend these things not because I want you to sign up for them, but because, brother, I just earn a lot of rewards this way. So you probably could too. Yeah. because, brother, I just earn a lot of rewards this way. So you probably could too. Yeah, well, if you're shopping online, it's kind of crazy not to at least make, you know, a tiny bit of effort to click from a shopping portal, even if you don't do all the things we were talking about. Just, you know, at the very least, you know, make sure you've got signed up for Rakuten

and see if that store's on there and go through there. At the minimum. At the minimum. Right. Very good. All right, I think that brings us to this week's question of the week this week's question of the week comes in from a lot of people and so i'm going to ask you greg i'm going to simplify it because we've had a lot of versions of this question what's the deal with hilton gift cards what's going on because hilton gift cards have been popular maybe you can tell us why and why they've also been unpopular simultaneously in some ways well all right so they've been popular because the initially because the hilton credit cards um the business one and the surpass

one um both have been both, as now a standard benefit, offer a certain amount of rebate for any Hilton hotel spend you do each quarter. So the Surpass card, it's $50 per quarter, and the business card's $60 per quarter. And people have found that buying Hilton gift cards online with those cards trigger those rebates. So you just use your surpass card to buy a $50 Hilton gift card, and then you get $50 back each quarter. And then things escalated at the end of last year when the Amex business platinum cards added the same deal, $50 per quarter with each Amex business platinum card

you have as long as you enroll in that benefit. And so everybody wants to buy those gift cards online. Last I saw, they weren't available online right now. But a lot of people bought them, have these gift cards, and then go to a Hilton property to use them and then run into problems. A lot of people are finding they're just not working. Yeah, it's really annoying. And I thought that this question was worth floating here because I'm sure that there are probably readers who bought some of these over the last month or two and are just anticipating using them down the road and and may not know yet that they're fraught with issues. So there's a few different versions of issues. And then there's also some plenty of reports of using them without issues. So one of the common issues that we heard from a lot of

people early on was that at certain properties, and this doesn't seem to be everywhere, or it's not the way everybody processes the transaction, but it somehow gets treated sort of like a restaurant or gasoline purchase where there's like a temporary hold put on for a certain amount of money that blocks that as not being available. And so people were saying that like $6 or something or close to $10 or something was just not available. And so on a $50 gift card, for instance, you could charge $40, but not the full 50 was that was in the beginning, that was the first reports that I heard about this. And then I heard some people saying, Oh, no, they had no problem charging the 50. And so as I've tried to dig into reports, I've only gotten more and more confused, really, to be honest, I've heard that they won't work if charged in a foreign currency. But then I saw a report from somebody yesterday who was at a foreign property.

And by adding the card to their Apple Pay, adding the Hilton gift card to their Apple Pay, the hotel was able to charge their Apple Pay in local currency, and it did go through. So I don't know. I don't know how it's all working. But I do know that we've had two different types of reports. People who've said they weren't able to use them at all, actually three different types of reports, they weren't able to use them at all, they just got declined. And then the front desk staff have kind of shrugged their shoulders and said, I don't know, maybe we just don't take these. And then there's been people who've said, okay, well, they can only use it up to a certain amount that's less than the face value. And then there have been people who've said, I've used five or

six of them at once with no issue at all, They were all able, they all sailed through. And what it seems to me is that there must be either something in how some hotels are set up in terms of their merchant category code, their MCC, that maybe makes a difference in how the charge gets processed and whether or not it works properly. And or there's a staff training issue where some staff know how to use these and others don't because a number of the success reports we've had where people have said that they've sailed through easily have been at like high traffic properties. Like somebody mentioned the Conrad New York, they had no problem using a bunch of these $50 cards. And I have to imagine that a property like that gets 1000 people a day coming in not 1000, but

a lot of people anyway that have gift cards. And so it's a very normal, regular transaction for them. Whereas if you stay at a Hilton Garden Inn in Austin, Texas, which somebody did and said that none of their gift cards worked, well, maybe they don't, they see a gift card maybe once a year or something. I don't know. So maybe there's a training issue in terms of how they process the charge. I don't know, but I do know that I'm not going to show up at a property with a stack full of these gift cards counting on them working. Right, right. Also, and this is true with any hotel gift cards, don't wait until checkout to go to the desk and try to use them, especially if you have a flight to catch. Go the day before or sometime during your stay when you've got some downtime and when there's

not a big line at the reception and then go and try to use your gift cards. Just say apply to the bill because chances are good, especially if they're not busy at the time you go, that they're going to admit that they don't know how to do it. They'll go get the manager who also doesn't know how to do it, who will call Joe who did it last week successfully. And Joe will walk the managers through how to do it. Totally right. That's a great piece of advice. You're probably not going to be able to take care of it at check in either. But yeah, I always try to stop the day before or early in the morning, maybe before breakfast and very frequently, not with Hilton gift cards so much because I haven't used them yet with Marriott gift cards, I'll just end up having to leave the gift cards there and let them figure it out while I go to breakfast or whatever. So,

you know, anticipate some of that if you're going to use these, don't anticipate that it's going to be as simple as you go to the desk, and they're going to swipe each one. And that's all there is to it, because it hasn't been that way. And I mentioned the Apple Pay tip specifically, because we've had a couple of success reports with Apple Pay. And I don't know if there's something to that, but I know there's probably a lot of Apple users out there. So that's at least something else you can try. If they try to swipe the card and it won't work, that's something that at least I wanted to plant the idea that maybe you can add it to Apple Pay then and try that. So yeah, be prepared for a little bit of challenge if you've got these gift cards and you're looking to use them. It certainly, the number of failure reports

has made it such that I wouldn't book a property that was more expensive than what I was willing to pay in cash, if not for the gift cards. Or I would want to make sure that it's a property where I've seen success reports from other people that they've used gift cards with no problem. Still though, they might've used their gift card with Joe, right? And if Joe's not in the day that you're going to use it, I don't know if everyone knows what Joe knows. Exactly. Right, right. Joe, do us a favor, leave a note for the other employees about how to do this. Maybe even make them a little video or something showing them because it's not obvious. All right. So there you have it. There's your little cautionary tale and heads up there. That brings us to the end of this week's episode. If you've enjoyed this episode, you'd

like to get more of this stuff in your email inbox each day or each week, you can go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe. We just launched a new weekly newsletter that Greg is writing that we've gotten tons of positive feedback on. By and large, people have loved it, and you probably will too. So you can sign up for that or for daily post alerts or instant post alerts at frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join all that. And then, of course, you can join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group, which is a good resource for stuff like posting, hey, I'm going to stay at the Conrad New York and I have some Hilton gift cards. Have other people had success using them at this property? That's probably what I would do if I were going to stay at a Hilton property. So you might want to join our Frequent

Mailer Insiders Facebook group for stuff like that. And wherever you're watching or listening to the show, don't forget to leave us some feedback. Give us a thumbs up. We always appreciate those things. Subscribe and enable notifications. And we will see you guys again soon. If you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or a piece of feedback for the Giant Mailbag, you can send it to... Send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com.

Bye, everybody.